Forced Convection Heat Transfer in Two-Dimensional Ribbed Channels

Abstract

<p> The progress of technology in the electronic components industry has been rapidly growing. The evolution of various techniques has made it possible for this industry to grow and diversify with the market demand. Thus, the development of electronic component products over a short span of time requires having highly efficient tools for design and manufacturing. Advances in commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) softwares and computational power have enabled modeling to a high level of architectural details. Nowadays, computer aided design becomes an essential design tool in the engineering environment. Computer analysis reduces both the time development cycle and the prototyping costs in the early to intermediate design phases. The accuracy of the computational prediction of heat transfer rates depends mostly on the correct choice of turbulent model. Although many turbulent models, rather than a universal turbulent model, have been developed during the last two decades, there is usually one model that performs better than others for certain flow conditions. </p> <p> In the present research, a turbulence model is selected from amongst a few candidates, namely standard k- 8, RNG k- 8, shear stress transport (SST), and Reynolds Stress Model (RSM), based on comparisons with experimental data and direct numerical simulation (DNS) results from previous work. The SST turbulence model shows excellent agreement with the DNS results and, hence, is considered an appropriate turbulence model for thermal analysis of electronic packages with elements that have almost the same heights. Moreover, the average Nusselt number of array of obstacles is obtained numerically using commercial code ANSYS-CFX 1 0.0. The effects upon the mean Nusselt number arising from parameteric changes in Reynolds number, element height, element width, and element-to-element distance are compared and discussed. Finally, the parametric study has offered a set of correlations for the mean Nusselt number of arrays of mounted obstacles in the channel flow. </p>